Matthew Brown

Professor of Music Theory

Matthew Brown was born in London and studied at the Royal College of Music J.D., King’s College (B. Mus.), and Cornell University (M.A., Ph. D.). He was a Junior Fellow at the Society of Fellows, Harvard University. Brown was a member of the Eastman faculty from 1986-1992 and rejoined the School in 1997. He has also taught at Harvard University (1986), Louisiana State University (1992-1997), theUniversity of Texas at Austin (2003), and has been a member of the Mannes Institute for Advanced Studies in Music Theory. Brown has been the recipient of numerous awards such as the Provost’s Interschool Interdisciplinary Award (University of Rochester), Summer Research Fellowship (LSU), Sage Graduate Fellowship (Cornell University), the Purcell Prize and Sambrooke Exhibition (King’s College, London). Over the past fifteen years, he has supervised fifteen Ph. D. dissertations. His advisees have won numerous external fellowships, including Presser, Fulbright, and Chateaubriand awards, and have positions at major universities, such as NYU, the University of Minnesota, the University of Arizona, the University of Western Ontario, the University of Alabama, and the Eastman School of Music. Brown’s publications include three books–Debussy’s ‘Ibéria’: Studies in Genesis and Structure (Oxford, 2003),Explaining Tonality: Schenkerian Theory and Beyond (Rochester, 2005), and Debussy Redux. The Impact of His Music onPopular Culture (Indiana, 2012)—as well as over thirty articles and reviews in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Journal of Musicology, Nineteenth-Century Music,Journal of Music Theory, Music Theory Spectrum, Intégral, Journal of Film Music, Science, New Harvard Dictionary of Music, Analyzing Opera, Understanding Rock, and elsewhere.